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And we have its opposite, "Ouraphobia"--an unreasoned aversion to using aircraft tail surfaces. From the Greek. "Billy's ouraphobia doomed his designs to very limited CG, marginal handling characteristics, and performance that lagged more conventional designs."

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And we have its opposite, "Ouraphobia"--an unreasoned aversion to using aircraft tail surfaces. From the Greek. "Billy's ouraphobia doomed his designs to very limited CG, marginal handling characteristics, and performance that lagged more conventional designs."

I don't understand why some folks have such aversion to tail.

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-the tail=very good ,draggy element...

the birds are needed in it in landing/start phase...in fly the tail is "closed" !

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I know this is meant as a joke (and it's a good one) but phobia means irrational fear not dislike. I suffer from real Nurflugelphobia I don't know anything about flying wings but they scare me. And I don't think I've ever made a negative comment about them.

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I know this is meant as a joke (and it's a good one) but phobia means irrational fear not dislike. I suffer from real Nurflugelphobia I don't know anything about flying wings but they scare me. And I don't think I've ever made a negative comment about them.

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Aha, the problem is that you don't know anything about them!

Although you'll often seen me shooting down nurflugel ideas, it's because I'm really interested in them. Interested enough to have done a lot of my own research and find a lot of their pitfalls. The things are tricksy to get right. You can't just, say, put a bigger tail surface on to solve some stability quirk.

My nurflugel project is on hold. I need to start with something easier...

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I know this is meant as a joke (and it's a good one) but phobia means irrational fear not dislike. I suffer from real Nurflugelphobia I don't know anything about flying wings but they scare me. And I don't think I've ever made a negative comment about them.

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Yes, it was a joke, FritzW. But it seems that some take the whole thing seriously.

Just because someone likes the idea of a flying wing without a tail does not mean that they are obsessed, or has an aversion to tails. It just means they are interested in tailless aircraft and how to make them work. Myself, I am an engineer by training and talent. Although not an aero engineer, I just love tackling a tough technical problem and working it out until the end. In fact, there have been times when someone said "it can't be done", so I would go ahead and do it anyway to prove them wrong.

Barnaby Wainfan, that built the famous Facetmobile, was an engineer for Northrup Grumman. You can not say he had an aversion to tails. As for tail vs tailless, he wrote a paper in 1989 titled "Let's consider airfoils for flying wings" In it he said:

As the old saying goes, the addition of a tail to an aircraft hides a multitude of sins. The horizontal tail has enough pitch control power to trim out virtually any pitching moment the wing generates. When we remove the horizontal tail to get a tailless aircraft or flying wing, the trimming task once performed by the horizontal tail must now be performed by the wing.

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This implies that there are lessons learned from flying wings that can be used to improve tailed aircraft.

The 2nd link states that birds furl their tails during high speed flight, so the area is smaller. Also, consider the area of the wing that is behind the CG. And don't forget that birds have real-time morphing wings, which is where most of the stability comes from.